 Welcome everyone. It's not snowing and it's not raining and it's not sleeting so thank you for coming. Just one reminder please turn off your cell phones and now Sandy Baird is going to introduce her speaker. So today we have the honor and pleasure of hearing Professor Nicole Phelps from UVM where she is an associate professor of history with a specialty in the Habsburg Empire. Who knew? Anyway, she also is a graduate of the University of Minnesota where she got her PhD and also her MA and she has a BA from the George Washington University. She has a resume that it's too long to really summarize. It's 14 pages full of many of her articles and publications and her very many awards. I will introduce her mainly by saying she is a fabulous professor. I took her class on World War I at UVM and it's with great pleasure that she's here to speak to us today about the Versailles Treaty. Thank you. Thank you very much everyone for being here. So I am delighted to be addressing a very different kind of audience than I usually do and hopefully I've pitched my talk correctly. As I was contemplating what it was that I was going to say a couple of days ago I was like, okay, what am I going to say? The Paris Peace Conference. And then I went and looked at the website and I realized that I had been given an actual question to answer which was, the Treaty of Versailles, did it bring peace? Which totally changed what I was thinking about telling you. But, so, the Treaty of Versailles, did it bring peace? No. Are there any questions? So I'd like to kind of talk today about three ways in which the treaty failed to bring peace. And one of those is to talk about how it was kind of an incomplete legal conclusion to the war. I'd also like to talk about the ongoing, on-the-ground violence that was happening in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia, while the peace conference was going on and following that for the next several years. And then I'd also like to think kind of more broadly about a century's worth of nationalist and anti-colonial violence that certainly the treaty didn't stop and we might argue that the treaty helped to create. So that's kind of where I'm going today. Okay, so if we think about the legal side of things, you know, one way of thinking about what a war actually is, is that it's a different set of legal relationships between governments. There's broken diplomatic relations and then declarations of war that mean that some countries are belligerent powers and other countries are neutral in the conflict. And so if we're thinking about World War I and kind of remembering who's on what side of this, you know, we have the four central powers, Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. And within, mostly by the end of 1914, but definitely by mid-1916, we have a range of allied powers who are fighting against the central powers, everyone from the British and the French, also the Russians, the Japanese, Italy, Portugal, all sorts of people. And then, of course, as the war goes on, in 1917, the United States enters the war, but when they do that, they radically alter the war. There's many other states that follow the United States into the war, including many countries in Central and South America, also China, Siam, Liberia. And so what we end up with then is a set of altered legal relationships among all of these different participants. And sometimes when we think about, okay, so when did the war end? People often focus on the armistice. And in particular, they focus on November 11th, 1918. And of course, an armistice is an end to fighting, but it's not an end to the disrupted wartime legal relationships that a war had created. And of course, also when we're thinking about the November 11th, 1918 armistice, we're really only thinking about Germany. The other central powers had left the war previously. So Bulgaria has an armistice in September of 1918, the Ottomans have an armistice in October of 1918, and the Austro-Hungarians in about a week earlier in November of 1918. And again, so okay, we have a stop to certain types of fighting in the war. But it's really, really crucial for us to remember that when the armistice happens, there's still a lot of wartime stuff and wartime disruption that's still happening. One of the most important things that's still going on is the Allied blockade of Europe, which in particular is preventing food supplies from getting to Germany and Austria-Hungary. And that blockade is not lifted with the armistice. It continues on. And we should also think about the fact that there's still thousands and thousands of soldiers deployed. There's still thousands of prisoners of war in camps. And all of the kind of logistical apparatus that was necessary to accommodate those people, to feed them, to house them, to clothe them, all of that system is continuing on in place. With the possibility that the fighting may start again, that the armistice might not be over, but certainly what I'm trying to say is that a war does not stop on a dime, okay? And so we have all of this stuff that's still going on. The peace conference itself, I'm not going to spend too much time on, this is something that's been covered in a lot of popular histories. But it's a complex process and it's more complex than the picture of Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George and George Clemensow that is usually how it's represented. I thought about putting that picture up there and I was like, no, I don't want to reinforce that. There's an initial kind of planning start to the conference in December of 1918. And here you have representatives of the four major allied powers or allied and associated powers, because the United States calls itself an associated power, not an allied power. They want some freedom of action kind of within their cooperation with the other allies. So we have the British, the French, the Americans, the Italians who are doing some planning about what a peace conference might look like. And they decide without really thinking it through that they want to invite representatives of all of the other allied countries to come to Paris as soon as possible. And so that kind of formal start to the Paris peace conference happens in January of 1919. That's also when President Wilson arrives in Paris. And so you have this large group of people representing several dozen countries who are in Paris ready to remake the world. And the big four hadn't really thought how they were going to entertain all of those people, kind of what they were going to have them do. And they partially came to realize that that was way too many people to make a lot of specific and important decisions. And maybe they didn't care what the Brazilians and the Cubans thought about all of these issues anyway. And so the kind of general body of the peace conference is broken up dealing with a bunch of large issues like the possibility of creating an international labor organization that's going to govern workers' rights. And you have a group that's working on thinking about the League of Nations. And you have a group that's thinking about kind of how new rules of aviation should work because World War I is when we get the introduction of airplanes. And so they're kind of doing their thing. And then you have a range of smaller committees where you have representatives from the big four countries and some smaller countries depending on the question. And they're doing kind of a lot of the real work of negotiating what's going on. And then you have the big four who are having the highest level of discussion. And the plan initially was that this conference that all of the allies were at was going to be like a pre-conference. Because the idea was that then they were going to invite representatives of the former central powers governments to come and negotiate and sign a treaty. That was the model that had been used very successfully at the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Everybody kind of buys into the system. But their process of trying to figure out what the basic terms would be before they could start that larger peace conference dragged on and on and on for months. And they realized that they needed to stop the peace conference and not do that other bit. And so in June of 1919 they summoned the representatives of the German government to sign the treaty of Versailles. So they never got to the part of actually negotiating with the other central powers. And so at that point Wilson and David Lloyd George they leave Paris. But the peace conference is actually still going on because there's still all kinds of issues that lower level people are working on. And ultimately the Paris Peace Conference just kind of morphs into the League of Nations on January 1st 1920 with much the same kind of committee structure and some of the same personnel. Okay so I'd be happy in the Q&A to say more about how all of that actually worked. But to move on here what's important one of the things that's important to keep in mind about this is that the Treaty of Versailles is just with Germany. Okay and so it doesn't end kind of all of the legal disruption and the wartime disruption that was caused by the war. So we have a cartoon here, the Big Four Dental Treatment. Okay so the Germans have been called to Paris. They have their peace treaty terms and we have the Bulgarians and the Turks and the Austro-Hungarians waiting their turn and being very concerned about what's going to happen to them as a result of their appointments. And in fact the process of getting peace treaties with those other countries is long and drawn out. So Austria is actually fairly quick. They are obliged to sign their treaty, Treaty of Saint-Germain in September of 1919. The Bulgarians have a treaty in November of that year. But then it takes longer. The Ottomans have a treaty in August of 1920 and the Hungarians in September of 1920. So it's a long drawn out process. And of course we should also keep in mind that when we're talking about a treaty, signing a treaty is not the same thing as ratifying a treaty. Okay so there's plenty of treaty out there that have been negotiated and signed but never entered into force because they weren't ratified. And different countries have different systems for how treaties are ratified based on the structure of their government. But certainly for the United States that process requires a vote by two thirds of the U.S. Senate. Now when Wilson, so Wilson didn't like a lot of people. I think that actually just sums it up. But he didn't like most of the people in the State Department. He didn't really like a lot of other politicians. And so he was very interested in kind of keeping the peace process as much just with him as possible. And that kind of famous picture of Lloyd George and Clemenceau and Wilson kind of suggests that they were really able to do that. But the American delegation in Paris, the American Commission to Negotiate Peace had more than 1,000 members. Okay. And so they're on a variety of different committees. There's a bunch of military officials who are part of the committees. A lot of the people are people who were hired to do post-war planning and hired to work in an organization called the Inquiry, which has subsequently become the Council of Foreign Relations. But the idea was to keep post-war planning out of the State Department. Anyway, so these thousand-plus Americans that are there contributing to constructing this treaty includes zero Republican senators. And they have the majority in the Senate. And so Wilson, a Democrat, is setting himself up for major problems when it comes to ratification because he hadn't been doing the work of trying to get a domestic buy-in for the treaty, and in particular domestic buy-in from the Senate. And so the Senate, as many of you may know, they propose a series of reservations to the treaty. So parts that they're not going to follow or additions that they want to put in there. And they're thinking what they're really aiming for are two things. One is to maintain the United States' ability to act unilaterally in foreign policy, so on its own without having to work with other people. But the Senate is also particularly concerned about protecting Congress's role in foreign policy. So they don't want a treaty that is self-executing. So they want to make sure that the House continues to have its power over the budget. They want to make sure that the Senate continues to have its power to advise and consent on treaties, which is what the Constitution tells them they're supposed to do. And so they make these changes and they actually vote on the treaty twice, and both times it fails. We have a political cartoon here that it's called The Accuser. And so we have humanity here pointing the finger of blame and also the finger to God. God is doing the blaming through humanity. Blaming the U.S. Senate here for either mortally wounding or killing the peace treaty. And so it is a very big deal that the United States doesn't ratify this treaty. The first time that the Senate votes no, Wilson then goes on a big tour of the United States to try and get people, the public, to approve the treaty, to write to their senator. He works so hard on that, that he has a stroke and a bunch of other health issues. And so basically he is, for the last year or so of his presidency, he's actually not functioning as the president. And there's no constitutional provisions for dealing with that yet. Basically his wife is the president. And so the Senate votes again and they reject it a second time. So the United States actually has to separately get out of its legal conflict with the Central Powers. And so the United States doesn't sign treaties until 1921 with Germany, with Austria and with the new Hungary. There's no treaty with the Bulgarians or the Ottomans because the United States had never declared war on them. And so they don't need to kind of fix that legal relationship. Again, kind of the United States on the whole, the Senate is really recommitting to the idea of American unilateral action. We often hear this as saying that the United States retreats to isolationism. And I would caution against that. Americans continue to be actively involved in foreign policy. They continue to be actively involved economically. And it's more about protecting the Americans' ability to act on their own, to make their own decisions about how they want to engage with the rest of the world, rather than committing to the League of Nations or a more permanent military alliance. Okay, so we have this kind of legal story about ending the war. And we can see that it's much messier, certainly not November 11th, 1918. But it's much messier because of all of those relationships that have to be adjusted and formally closed. So then I want to kind of think about what's happening on the ground when the Paris Peace Conference is happening. As we saw, the conference took six months just to deal with Germany, and they're still working for quite some time after that. And a lot of the people at the Paris Peace Conference seemed to sort of have this idea that the rest of the world had just stopped. And that they were waiting for the people at Paris to say, here, here's where the borders are. Here's who your government is. But the world doesn't really work that way. And so what we have on the ground is people who are trying to stay alive, trying to figure out what they need to do to get the blockade to stop, who are trying to think about what, you know, if their countries are going to be broken up or radically reorganized, how do they get the best stuff? So they're thinking about what they can do to try and get the best possible outcome for this. And there's lots of violence that's involved in that. So one example in Hungary, which is now, so Austria-Hungary gets broken up into different pieces. And the Hungarians are, you know, they had been used to being this actually pretty big kingdom with lots of pieces that they had had for about a thousand years. And now they're reduced to a significantly smaller area. And the Romanians invade Hungary because they're trying to take over big parts of it. The Czechs had decided that they wanted to have a state with the Slovaks. And the Czechs had always been part of Austria, but the Slovaks had always been part of Hungary. So the Hungarians are trying to hold on to the Slovaks. So we have lots of violence there in Central Europe. Also, in the Ottoman Empire, we have in particular the Greeks and the Italians who are looking to expand their territorial holdings. And so there's warfare into the early 1920s in Anatolia. And I raised this question, are they fighting the Ottomans or are they fighting the Turks? Because that's one of the other things that's going on, is that the Ottoman Empire is collapsing, in part because it lost the war, but also because there's a movement of Turkish nationalists who want to take over the government. And so they actually end up needing to do another end of World War I treaty when it comes to the Middle East because the Turks who took over the former Ottoman government, they rejected the 1920 treaty and pretty much rightly so because they had completely changed the borders of their country and they certainly had changed its governing structure. And so in 1923, we have the Treaty of Lausanne, which is ending the war again in the Middle East and also dealing with that Greek and Italian conflict. And of the country of Turkey like we know it today. And then, of course, the other place where there's huge amounts of fighting is all of Asia. And so the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, which had started in 1917, that is continuing to produce lots and lots of violence. And I have a couple of maps here to show some of it. So, of course, the Bolsheviks are trying to gain control of the country and we have people who are Russians who don't want them to be in control. But there's also all sorts of violence at the European edge of the empire. Finland, which had been part of Russia, it declares its independence. The Baltic states declare their independence and get taken back over by the Russians. Poland gets created at the Paris Peace Conference, but it's also in a war with Russia while they try and figure out where the boundaries are. There's fighting in Belarus and Ukraine. And then there are Americans and British and French troops who are landed kind of in the northern part of Russia here to try and help prevent the communist takeover of Russia. And you have, well, so this is the Kolchak's government. This is the kind of white Russian government that's attempting to block the Soviets. You can see here allies and check a slow box. So you have check prisoners of war who left, broke out of their prisoners of war camp and were attempting to get home. They were going the long way. They were not going west towards Europe. They were going east with the idea of hitching a ride when they got to the Pacific. And the reason they're doing that is because they're walking along the Trans-Siberian Railroad and they're expecting less conflict in that direction. And they're fighting Bolsheviks along the way. And the Americans and the Japanese land troops at the Pacific coast and invade Russia that way to try and assist the Czechoslovaks. So, okay, so this one is from December of 1918. When we look about a year later in January of 1920, we can see how much the Soviets have consolidated their control. We can see, so this is at a point where we still have this kind of independent set of Baltic states that's not going to be there in like another year. And we have, but we still have the Soviets who are trying to deal with their Asian borders. And by this point, the British and the French and the Americans had left, but the Japanese are still there. And their fighting between the Japanese and the Russians goes on until January of 1925 when they signed the Soviet-Japanese Basic Convention. And so, arguably, this is what ends World War I for Japan with the Soviets. But there's one important bit that they couldn't come to a resolution on. And that is Manchuria, which is the kind of really valuable kind of access to the Pacific. And if I presume that my esteemed colleague, Professor Buchanan, talked about this if he was talking about World War II, many historians would like to date the beginning of World War II as the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. So, basically, it doesn't get settled in World War I and it's the kind of festering element that starts World War II kind of in the Asian front. Okay, so we have that kind of continued Japanese story. Often, and I think quite rightly so, we are and have taught to think of the rise of Nazism and Hitler coming to power in Germany as a response to the Treaty of Versailles. And in particular, the kind of territorial losses that Germany suffered, as well as all of the economic problems that were brought along because of the system of reparations payments that was part of the Treaty of Versailles. And I think it's quite right to think of a direct connection between the Treaty and the rise of Hitler. I would suggest, and so by the time we're in World War II, then we're also in the Cold War. So, if we think about the Cold War as basically being an inability of the Russians and the British, French and Americans to come to a successful conclusion of World War II. They don't resolve that issue until 1989. That's when the Treaty that formally ends occupation of Germany and ends World War II happens, 1989. So, okay, so we're still there seeing our connections between World War I, World War II and the Cold War. But then I'd also like to suggest that we think about some other kinds of conflict. We think about anti-colonial conflict or decolonization. Many potential examples here, but we think about the war in Algeria for independence from France. We can think about the Vietnam War, which starts initially as an effort to end French colonialism and then becomes more complex. We can definitely think about ethnic cleansing in the 1990s, so Bosnia, Rwanda, and arguably we can think about the war in Iraq and all of these kind of conflicts. And I think, well, so the, you know, can we tie all that back to Versailles? Yes, yes we can. And I'd like to, I think there's several ways to do this, but one important starting point here is for us to keep in mind that the Treaty of Versailles includes the Covenant of the League of Nations. That's in fact the first part of the Treaty of Versailles. And of course the League of Nations is like the precursor to the UN. It's supposed to be an international organization that is helping countries avoid conflict because it provides a forum for arbitrating disputes, discussing disputes, and it also has a military component so that if one country gets attacked, all of the rest of them are supposed to come together to the aid of that country. And also if somebody deliberately starts a war, they can be penalized by the military strength of the others in the League. So, you know, it is in some ways it's designed to be a sort of utopian form of world government where you can talk through your problems, but it also has a definite military component to it. But I'd like to actually focus on a perhaps lesser talked about article of the Covenant, which is in the Treaty, and that is Article 22 and I will read it to you because I know that that is very small here. So, to those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war, World War I, have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the states which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world. There should be applied to the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this Covenant. The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is that the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience, or their geographical position can best undertake this responsibility and who are willing to accept it, and that this tutelage should be exercised by them as mandatory on behalf of the League. The character of the mandate must differ according to the stage of development of the people, the geographical situation of the territory, its economic conditions, and other similar circumstances. And this article then goes on to talk about different parts of the world. It says basically that in most of the former Ottoman lands, they're pretty close to being able to govern themselves. They're pretty civilized. In Central Africa, they're pretty far off. And in the Pacific, they're really far off. And so what ultimately we're seeing here is a re-entrenchment of colonialism, of the idea that some countries and some peoples are superior to others and thus have a right to rule over them. So again, we're seeing that, especially in the Ottoman Empire, we have the mandate system that's put in place. So for example, the British have a mandate in Palestine. The French have one in Syria. And where the boundaries of the mandates are drawn is either arbitrary or with an eye toward the natural resources at the area, depending on which part of the line we're looking at. It's not really paying attention to differences or similarities of the people who are living in those new regions. And so it's creating unusual or certainly non-traditional political structures, local political structures, but then also giving the Europeans control over that. And so we're extending colonialism. The Japanese delegation at the Paris Peace Conference had tried to avoid this clause. And in fact, they also tried to go a step further than that to have a clause that promised guaranteed racial equality globally. And that was rejected by the British and French and the Americans. The Chinese left the conference for quite some time after that. And the Japanese kind of scaled back their participation. So we definitely have a potential missed opportunity here. But one of the things that makes it so challenging and so frustrating to a lot of people at the time is that the rhetoric of President Wilson and of many other people in fighting the war was that this was a war about self-determination. And the way that the world was going to be organized after the war was, again, kind of based on self-determination, that people would get to decide what their government were going to be. Wilson used this word a lot. And he lost control over it. People that he had no intention of letting self-determine, they embraced this language. But one of the problems with it is that it was never really defined. So sometimes you hear it as national self-determination, sometimes just self-determination. If you're thinking of a self, you might be thinking of an individual human being. So none of this is clear. And so that the colonialism is in there in the Treaty of Versailles. All of the problems with self-determination are a little bit harder to see when you're just looking at the Treaty of Versailles. But if you step back and look at the whole system of treaties that was put in place at the end of the war and some of the other governmental policies that are put in place, I think you can see some of the problems more clearly. So there is some places where there really is self-determination by individual voters. So the Treaty of Versailles includes provisions for a number of plebiscites. So in different sort of border regions of Germany, they're going to have a vote of the people who live there about whether they want to be part of Germany, whether they want to be part of Poland, whether they want to be part of France, that kind of thing. And so, again, we have an actual democratic process here. And with the idea that the people who live in this part of the world are capable of exercising that kind of decision-making process. Okay, so, actually my numbers are messed up. Oh, I missed something. Okay, well, you can see there, you can see where I'm going. And it's not a big reveal anymore, so I'm sorry about that. So what's really important to keep in mind is that the whole European and American way of thinking that's really embodied in the Treaty of Versailles and its other related treaties is the idea of racial hierarchy. And that there are differences among peoples and there's a ranked difference. And when they talk about race, they are talking about that in a more capacious way than we might think of it. So it covers what we might call race, but also ethnicity today. So they're thinking about Poles and Germans and Spaniards kind of all as separate races. And so it's the kind of racial theory that facilitates colonialism. But it also has the idea in it that members of a particular racial group are all fundamentally the same and that they all have the same sort of political will. And that political will is biological. And so the idea for creating world peace, if you think that the world is organized in races this way, is to create racially homogenous nation states with the idea that to really have a truly functioning democratic society, everybody in the society needs to be a member of the same race. Essentially, it's not majority rule, it's like democracy works because everybody thinks the same thing. But this is deeply entrenched in the world view of people who are participating at the conference. And so it's really, there certainly are places where this idea of racial homogeneity is not followed. In Austria they have a plebiscite and they vote to join Germany. But the British, French and Americans don't let them do that. It's mostly the French that don't let them do that because they're concerned about Germany having too much strength. But it also, I mean the British and the French are, sorry, the British and the Americans, they think that was a weird decision. And so when 1938 comes along and the Germans take over Austria in the Anschluss, there's not a lot of objection to it because people are still thinking in these terms. So if the Austrians and the Germans all speak German, it must be all racially German and it would make sense if they were all in one country. So in some places we have the plebiscites. As I've already said, we have kind of a re-entrenchment of colonialism. But one of the things that we see then as a result of World War I is we see a growing number of independence movements in various European empires. And typically at the time those independence movements are also conceived of in nationalist terms. So they don't want a new kind of Ottoman Empire where you have a diversity of different people all in one state. They want an Arab state, they want a Korean state, they want a Moroccan state. And that means then that not everybody who lives in that place is a potential legitimate member of that movement. So it works to help combat colonial government but also to feed nationalism and nationalist violence in the parts of the world that are seeking independence. And then the other component of this that's coming out of the whole set of treaties, harder to see when we're looking just at Versailles, is the way that border construction is done. And so here we should primarily be looking at Austria-Hungary, which again is kind of being approached as a country that's high enough in the racial hierarchy to be able to self-govern. But the borders that are created are to create an Austria, a Hungary, a Poland, Czechoslovakia and what's going to become Yugoslavia. And Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia on the face of it it suggests that those are multiracial states, because there's at least two different groups. But the way they are pitched, the way the propaganda works to try and convince western leaders that they should support these governments is to argue that basically the Czech language and the Slovak language are pretty much the same, so they're really all in the same race anyway, so it's going to be fine. So they're consciously being pitched in those terms to the politicians who are going to make crucial decisions about which governments are going to exist. And so we can see this kind of in the breakup of Austria-Hungary, but I think we should also kind of be looking for these same kind of ideas in one of the other subsets of treaties that comes out of the Paris Peace Conference. And those are the minority treaties. So the new Czechoslovak state, the new Poland, they all have to sign treaties where they promise to protect the rights of the minority groups living in their country. So for example, in Czechoslovakia, they have to protect the rights of Germans who are still living in the territory. But the way this is expressed, the minority is a group, it's not individuals, and the whole rhetoric surrounding it suggests that the country is there for the majority, and that the minority is really not supposed to be there. And that's an idea that's going to help legitimate violence for nationalist parties. We see it in World War II, we see it in Bosnia in the 1990s, where the goal kind of is to try and create that state that doesn't have any minorities in it. We should also see this in immigration restriction, which at the time, so when World War I started in many parts of the world, including the United States, you did not need a passport or a visa to cross an international border, unless you were Chinese, where you couldn't get into the U.S. But what we get out of World War I is first an adoption of temporary passports, but then most governments, including the United States, opt to make that system permanent, to make it more difficult for people to cross borders, to also make it clearer who each individual person was. And the United States adopts the National Origins quota system for immigration in 1924 after kind of attempting it in 1919 and 1921, where the idea is to dramatically reduce the number of immigrants who can come into the country by giving each country in the world a certain number of quota slots, a certain number of people who can come in. And every country gets 100, but then if you get more than 100, it's based on what percentage of people of that race were present in the U.S. based on the 1890 census. And statistically it's very difficult to work this out, but the whole idea behind it is that there are discernible racial categories, and it's okay for some people to enter the country, but some people not to do so. And those kind of restrictions are also being put in places like Canada, Australia, South Africa that are also like the United States, white British settler colonies originally. And we should also be thinking domestically about what this looks like. This is the era of Jim Crow in the United States where you have that manifestation of racial hierarchy and segregation, and it's also a period of reservations and allotment, the process of breaking up reservations into smaller units for individual use that's being implemented for dealing with Native Americans in the United States. And so all of this is really kind of coming from the same place. This idea that had been generating more and more cultural authority as the 19th century went on and into the 20th century, and we really see it kind of crystallized and injected into the geopolitical system with the Treaty of Versailles and the related treaties with other countries. And that really is this idea, well it's the idea of racial difference and racial hierarchy, but it fits with this idea of self-determination because the way that they're defining the self in this is a group of people. It's a race. It's not individual human beings. And so we can see kind of over the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st, these two legacies of having this idea really kind of at the heart of those treaties that we're supposed to bring peace at the end of World War I. Thank you. Can you use this one again? Yes. Am I supposed to do this? Okay, got it. Can you hear much about the reparation, the gold marks that the Germans had to pay that led into an economic crisis? Yes. Okay. Okay, where should I be? Is this okay? Can you hear me? Okay. So the reparations payments, they're basically what the British and the French in particular are aiming for is to have Germany literally pay the cost of the war. So like the French want all of their stuff that had been destroyed, rebuilt or returned. The Treaty of Versailles has very detailed instructions about how many sheep and how many telegraph poles are supposed to be given to France. The British are particularly interested in having reparations to pay for veterans pensions for the members of its armed services. And so the treaty has Article 231, what's known as the War Guilt Clause, that says Germany is morally responsible for the war. And that's kind of the legal innovation that's needed to then have all of these reparations payments, which are really kind of a new thing in international law. And the Germans attempt to pay them and they can't and it destroys the German economy, there's all sorts of inflation. And the Americans a couple of times try and step in and renegotiate. And they end up with this awesome system that always blows the minds of my undergrads. I want to have this lovely diagram where the Americans are lending money to the Germans. So the Germans can pay their reparations to the British and the French, so the British and the French can pay their debts to the United States. And that works until October of 1929. And then it all falls apart and we get the Great Depression. And this really, really does mess up the German economy and people are legitimately upset about it and looking for other solutions. You were talking about some kind of ideas going on about racial superiority and certain white Europeans are better than certain other peoples. And we were just having a discussion slightly before the letter about, I don't know if it's social Darwinism or not, but it's the eugenics movement and that it was okay in the 20s to sterilize people. And so this kind of thing was common in our culture or talked about. Yes, absolutely. It's really quite everywhere. And so the first eugenics sterilization laws in Indiana in 1907, so definitely World War I is kind of right in the era when that is happening. And of course, in the country as a whole, those sterilization laws disproportionately affect African American women. I think there's approximately 60,000 African American women who were sterilized often and without their consent. Like they went in and the white male doctor who knows best solved their problems for them. So yes, it's definitely, it's one of the elements of kind of implementing these ideas about race. And those ideas are everywhere. I mean, if you read the newspapers at the time, if you read novels, if you read trade journals, like everybody is trying to kind of talk about progress and civilization and their role in it. I mean, you can read trade magazines about the dairy industry and butter. And it's got progress in there and how the importance of good breeding and how the dairy supports the, well, supports breeding better Americans as well. So yeah, it really is, it is quite pervasive. And one last thing. So that's kind of a generational shift. So the people who are born in the 1890s and thus are like right of military age in World War One. They're people who were born directly into that environment. They're not people who kind of grew up with still hearing abolitionist rhetoric in the United States. And so we really see kind of in the teens, the 20s, the 30s real a lack of questioning of that sort of narrative. I've got a question. I was unaware that the League of Nations had a military component. Was that ever used or are there examples of that? That's a great question. So if you couldn't hear the question was did the League of Nations actually use its military component? And basically no. And it wasn't like a special League of Nations army. It would be that all of the different countries would need to contribute troops. And so of course that's going to raise the hurdle of actually getting something done. But because the United States wasn't in the League, the Soviets weren't in the League, the Germans didn't get to join the League until 1926. It never really works in that way. And when the League doesn't attempt to stop the Japanese in Manchuria in 1931, it's really over. But what the League does do and that we still actually see results of their work really is dealing with issues like slavery and human trafficking. They also developed kind of the first sort of international rules regarding the drug trade in particular opium. They're also important for kind of developing intellectual property regimes. So they did get stuff done and some of it is still very much with us but not so much in the realm of security and military involvement. Then how come in Vietnam were the Australians, the Koreans and all of them were in there too? If you said militarism, stop. I mean we were there and the South Koreans were there, the Australians. Under what treaty? Okay, so the League of Nations kind of pitles out in the early 1930s. And then at the end of World War II, they try it again and this time it's the United Nations. And it works more than the League of Nations did. Arguably it still has lots and lots of problems. But certainly the Korean War is articulated in the United States as a UN action, as a police action, which is what allows Truman to deploy troops without an actual declaration of war from Congress. I'd like to go back to your first slide about the Treaty of Versailles bring peace and you said no. How do you define peace? Because let me just make an observation. The world had more or less, if you define peace as the absence of hostility between 1918 and 1939, there was a lull where there was no real hostility, there were little local uprisings going on. But I think you're talking about peace in the Wilsonian sense of all men living together as brothers. The world is never at peace. There is no such thing as peace in that sense. Okay, so that's a great question. And I would say that one is right to say that in Western Europe you don't have military conflict in the 1920s and 30s. Once you hit Eastern Europe, you have the continuing Russian-related wars with the Baltics. We get the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s that becomes an international event. You have the Italians in the 1930s invading Ethiopia. You have continued fighting in the Middle East. We have American military interventions in Haiti, in Nicaragua, in the Dominican Republic. So I think if we look in a very localized way, then it brings peace for a while. But I don't think it doesn't do the work of eliminating militarized conflict that Wilson was envisioning for how the treaty with its League of Nations was going to work. Just a quick question about Woodrow Wilson, which probably is a separate lecture. I understand that around the end of World War I, when these negotiations would have been going on, he wasn't very well. Could you comment on how his health and well-being might have affected what the political developments were? In a couple of ways. First, when he goes to Paris in January of 1919, he actually needs to come home for about three weeks in February. Part of it is because of some domestic political issues, but more of it is that he has the flu. It's not like the Spanish flu. It's hard to diagnose somebody's medical problems from a century ago. But when it comes to Woodrow Wilson, people have tried. There are multiple medical biographies of Wilson. So in that sense, he's gone for part of the negotiations, and then he's in relatively good health for the rest of them. He comes back and goes on the trail to try and get support. As I mentioned before, he has a stroke. He has to cut that tour short. So the medical issues are definitely impacting the situation. I would say that the medical issues are the straw that breaks the camel's back in terms of the impact of his personality and management style on the way he had been running the government and conducting U.S. foreign relations. Thank you very, very much. Thanks for having me.